Invisible Generations: Irene Kelleher’s Story of Living between Indigenous and White

by Jean Barman

Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her inheritance. Her local community in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley all too often treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent that Irene embodied was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to not belong.

Attracted to the future British Columbia by a gold rush beginning in 1858, Irene’s white grandfathers had families with Indigenous women. Theirs was not an uncommon story. Some of the earliest newcomers to do so were in the employ of the fur trading Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Langley. And yet, more than one hundred and fifty years later, the descendants of these early pioneers are still waiting for their stories to be heard.

Through meticulous research, family records and a personal connection to Irene, Governor General award-winning historian Jean Barman explores this aspect of British Columbia’s history and the deeply rooted prejudice faced by families who helped to build Canada. Invisible Generations evokes the Catholic residential school that Irene’s parents and so many other “mixed blood” children attended. Among Irene’s family and friends we meet Josephine, who was separated as a child from her beloved upwardly mobile politician father. When her presence in his socially charged household became untenable, Josephine was dispatched to the same Fraser Valley boarding school. “The transition from genteel Victoria to St. Mary’s Mission was horrendous,” she wrote.  Yet individuals and families survived as best they could, building good lives for themselves and those around them. Irene was determined to be a schoolteacher and taught across the farthest reaches of the province, including Doukhobor children at a time when the community was vehemently opposed to their offspring attending school.

Stories like that of Irene and of her family and friends have been largely forgotten, but in Invisible Generations Barman brings this important conversation into focus, shedding light on a common history across British Columbia and Canada. It is, in Irene’s words, “time to tell the story.”

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2020

Reviews

[Christine Elsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read "Invisible Generations" by historian Jean Barman and became immersed in the story of Irene's life from an earlier era, as shared through her own eyes and through her stories. The book was a rich and meaningful read that took us deeply into the experience of being a mixed ancestry Indigenous person during the last century in British Columbia. As my own heritage is also Indigenous and stems from a mixed ancestry family from the mid-late 1800's, in early British Columbia and what was then known as New Caledonia, I related deeply to Irene's story as I see her personal portrayals in the lives of many of my own relatives and family members. Throughout the book, the question that's ultimately posed is on what it feels like to be an Indigenous person of mixed ancestry, in a predominantly white society where one must remain hidden within plain sight due to omnipresent racial prejudice. On reading the book, it became obvious that this was Irene's struggle and ultimately also her plight and message to her readers. Throughout the book, Barman shows both sensitivity and understanding in her authorship of the late Irene Kelleher's shared recollections while bringing her story to light. The Kelleher story is of special value to mixed ancestry Indigenous individuals, such as myself, who possess a parallel ancestral history to that found in the book. For us and those we're related to, it is especially important to read such stories that provide a window on our own Indigenous histories and the struggles of our grandparents and ancestors whose entire lives were lived in the shadow of racial prejudice. The book offers great clarification on this subject and on the bigotry of an earlier society, where racial prejudice served as the backdrop for mixed ancestry Indigenous lives and identities to the point that it authored not only who we were but also what we could become, to a much greater extent than is true today. Although such prejudice continues to persist, in lesser or greater degrees, even to the present.

[Ellie O'Day · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lost piece of BC's history, via Irene Kelleher's family. Dry prose.

[Clivemichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving portrait, well described and resourced.